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I’ve been waiting for the new Ubuntu release to install on my new T400 laptop. Because the T400 is so new, the previous Ubuntu and Fedora releases did not support the wireless card or the integrated graphics adapter. I also decided to try Ubuntu this time around after a brief experience with it in a virtual machine. I found Ubuntu handles restricted software much better than Fedora; nearly everything you could want (Sun Java, Adobe Flash, NVIDIA drivers, etc.) is available from a built-in repository and is properly packaged. No more futzing around with Livna or JPackage or whatever.

So I spent the past couple of days installing Ubuntu 8.10. This page on Thinkwiki has been a great help in getting everything working.

Here are some problems and solutions I encountered:

• Problem: Thinkpads have a recovery partition that can be accessed with the Thinkvantage button on boot. This recovery partition can be used to recover to the factory state, run diagnostics, etc. However, if you allow GRUB to overwrite the MBR to install the bootloader, you can no longer access the recovery partition with the Thinkvantage button.

  Solution: Follow these directions on ThinkWiki to install the GRUB bootloader on the boot partition (*not* on the MBR), then modify the Windows bootloader to boot Linux directly. With Windows Vista, the process for adding an entry to the boot menu has changed. Follow these directions to add a Linux entry to the boot menu. Don’t follow the main directions; look at Falcon006’s second comment for an example of exactly how to do this.

• Problem: Ubuntu does not provide a way to automatically partition the free space on a drive and use it for Ubuntu. There is a menu option that sounds like it is supposed to do that, but the graphic during the installer indicates that it will overwrite the Windows partition. I think the graphic is wrong, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

  Solution: Partition the drive manually. You want to create three partitions: /boot, /, and swap. First, create the /boot partition. Set the file system to ext3, size to 200 MB, and type to primary. Second, create the / partition. Type can be logical, and size can be whatever you want. Finally, create the swap partition. This can also be a logical partition, and the size should be somewhere between your RAM size and twice your RAM size. If you want to use hibernate, it needs to be at least your RAM size.

• Problem: The screen resolution is set too low initially, and the Change Screen Resolution tool does not allow the LCD’s native resolution (1440×900). The xorg.conf file doesn’t seem to be used anymore, so you can’t change this there.

  Solution: This is related to dual monitor outputs, even when are you using only one monitor. I believe the default is to mirror displays, and the VGA output is detected as not supporting the 1440×900 resolution. If you use the Change Screen Resolution tool to disable the second monitor (make sure Mirror Displays is unchecked first), 1440×900 will become available. This will fix the problem in your user account, but I still haven’t figured out how to fix this in the login screen.

• Problem: System does not wake up from sleep. It goes to sleep, but when you wake it up it hangs and then reboots.

  Solution: This appears to be a concurrency bug. Petri K from Ubuntu Forums suggests a workaround, which works for me.

I will continue to update this list as I come across further problems and solutions.